


Variations on a Theme

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, hence the very short chapters, how does one cope with an onrushing hiatus and an upsetting finale?, one writes hopelessly romantic au fic; that's how, very short sections; yet too discordant to be separated by mere line breaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-06-10 15:29:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6962566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it happens like this: she holds a gun to his head in the middle of a crowded airport, but he smiles, she hesitates, and he wins.</p><p>Sometimes it happens like this: they meet on a subway, exchange a glance, and never again cross paths.</p><p>Sometimes it happens like this: he’s the last living soul on the upper story of a parking garage and his nickname is spilling out of him like a badly dammed river and his last words are her name, but always--  </p><p>(Always, they find each other.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. alpha, part one

**Author's Note:**

> Just a vainglorious excuse to couch all the AUs I’ll never write in pretty words and publish them. There’s a small thread of coherency in here somewhere. Let me know if you find it, because I think I lost track of it somewhere along the way.

In all possible worlds, they meet.

Sometimes she takes over from Donald Ressler and tracks him. Hunts him.  Flies to Bangkok and Beijing and Borneo and Bolivia in the same week, exhaustion dogging her heels as relentlessly as she dogs him, playing a stunted game of leapfrog.

Then comes London and a muzzle pressed to the tip of his nose, and even Reddington has never been prodded with a firearm in _that_ particular spot before.

“On your knees,” she pants, out of breath from running the length of two airport terminals.  Reddington complies with a heaving chest.  He has to tilt his head upward to keep her eyes in his, lifting his hands to interlace behind his head, darting his tongue out to lick his lips.

“Agent Keen. Face to knees at last.”  Her last name from his lips drips none of the bile she usually associates with the mouths of criminal. She is too high on her triumph to register it, but when she plays back this moment like a movie scene later, she will shiver at the implications of his delighted tone. 

“Raymond Reddington, you are under arrest for--”

Liz isn’t sure which gives way: her knees or the ground itself.  But Reddington is already braced on the floor, his center of gravity lower than hers, and when she goes down he rises, and all the windows in Heathrow Airport shatter as one.  Screams match glass.  Her gun is in his hands, somehow; her backup is scattered in the madding throng; and he has only eyes for her: careful. Appraising. Satisfied.

He disassembles her gun in several short, violent movements.  She goes for his ankle with her foot, but he’s standing and steady and has a hundred pounds on her, and it’s futile.

“You know, I find,” he muses, looking down with his head cocked sideways, “that running is absolutely no fun without someone chasing you.”

By the time she’s on her feet and screaming into her earpiece and jumping on her toes to search the panicked masses, his fedora is gone.  She swears bloody murder and loses the sounds amidst chaos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a little bit of what I like to call my “3am-writing.” Concrit is appreciated. Unmercifully tearing apart my sentence structure and sheer pretentiousness is also appreciated.


	2. bravo

Once, she is brown hair whipping around her ears as she turns and laughs at some friend’s joke, observed only through a restaurant window, considered fleetingly and then discarded as his car continues past.


	3. alpha, part two

The next time Agent Keen tracks down Raymond Reddington comes three months later at an army base out of Sao Paulo, and she’s the only thing standing between Reddington and a waiting med evac chopper slicing and dicing the early evening air until it’s thick as soup.  She’s ducking under the blades out of habit and caution and taking potshots at a man weaving in and out of crates of bandages and blankets, the helicopter's original intended cargo.  Though she has seen him and his right-hand-man fell guerilla fighters with headshots at a hundred yards, somehow, she hasn’t been clipped, and her training isn’t that good and the evening isn’t dark enough yet for that to fully explain the Matrix-phenomenon away.

Her clip clicks empty, and instead of loading a new one she screws her courage to the sticking place and lobs the empty weapon overhand at where she knows Reddington is crouched and stands up, hands high.

Bullets pit the ground at her feet. One of them, she finds out later, puts a neat little hole in the hem of her pants.  The hail continues for a moment until his voice rises, higher than usual, and calls-- “Cease fire! _Não atire_!”

One-half of Liz’s mouth twists upward. This is the same way she feels when she says “hit me” on a 19 and gets the two of hearts. “It’s over, Reddington,” she yells.  “If you want to get on this helicopter you’ll have to go through me. And I don’t think you’re willing to do that.”

“Lizzie,” he shouts over to her-- “may I call you Lizzie?”

No, he may _not_ , and her hands ball into fists near her ears but he continues unabated--

“Please do not think that my reluctance to ruin even an ounce of your talent and beauty with a bullet somehow outweighs my reluctance to ruin my _own_ talent and beauty, which is very high.  Get out of my way or I will order my men to resume their fire.”

Suddenly, Liz very, very much regrets having thrown away her weapon.  “I can’t do that, Reddington. You know I can’t.”

Sometimes, her colleagues talk about negotiating with metaphors like “a careful dance“ and “a delicate game of chess,” but in that moment, she feels like calling them all out on their bullshit. This isn’t anything graceful. This is a game of chicken where the poultry in question is bright yellow-and-red rubber and squeaks when you squeeze it. This is absurdity.  This is a lone, outgunned FBI agent standing between ten wanted criminals and their getaway vehicle. This is the chicken chili con carne of ridiculous. This is--

\--A flash-bang grenade being lobbed at her from some unspecified location amidst the crates.  She hits the deck and throws an arm over her eyes, but her ears get no mercy, replacing the din of the rotating helicopter blades with a continuous tone almost out of hearing range.

When she uncurls from the ground, the helicopter is a hundred feet above her and rising, and now Liz really, _really_ wishes she hadn’t thrown away her gun, if only for the sake of the measly satisfaction a few parting potshots would have brought her.


	4. charlie

Sometimes she kills him.  Sometimes they meet too early and he is too rough with her secrets and he snaps her so neatly-- just like _that_ \-- a brittle twig underfoot on a jog in Central Park; a pinky finger broken by a pair of pliers-- and she kills him. 

When her hands shake, and her aim is off, and he has to watch her goodness take its first step down the ladder into hell as he bleeds out-- these are bad, bad ends for Reddington, a man who has only one beginning but oh so many ends, and most in the name of the same woman.

Sometimes, though, he gets to do his bleeding out while held in her arms, and watches the goodness die of grief instead, and this is the largest death he ever dies, in sweltering warehouses on curiously cold concrete floors, because Lizzie is saying--

“Damn it, damn it, _damn it_ , Red, for once in your life can’t you just do as I say and stop--” She chokes a little, fingers shaking at the sheer amount of liquid gushing over and through them, “--stop _bleeding_ , damn it, the ambulance is coming just _staywithme--_ ”

He quells everything with the long fall of a knuckle down her cheek, smearing his own blood down her skin.  “Lizzie. _Lizzie_.”

She seizes his hand in her own and grinds his bones together with her grip, crushing it to her bosom.  “You’re gonna be alright. Don’t talk right now, okay? Save your strength.”

“Lizzie,” he says again, and now she’s curious, now she’s fighting down the panic and pushing past her constant refrain of _where is it where’s the ambulance why isn’t it here yet where’s Ressler_ \-- because Red has put another puzzle right in front of her, and she wants to solve it, loves putting his pieces together as much as she loves dismantling every single button on his body--

(Once, she counted them as she undid them; nineteen buttons all told from his shirt and his waistcoat and his sleeves and one on his pants--)

She asks his forehead, “Why do you keep saying my name?”

Her ear is conveniently close. “I want it to be the last thing I say,” he says. “Lizzie.”

Lizzie.

Lizzie.

It is, in the end; and Liz is so frantic she nearly misses it, but it’s there, spoken right into her ear in the quiet tones of a man completely resigned.


	5. delta

Of course, sometimes Liz is the one to die. Her ever-rising hazard pay assures that she eats lead just as often as Red does.   
  
Liz breaks like steel under too much torsion. Red breaks like the ocean on a sharp rock because a wave does not know how to do anything but crash and crash and crash. It is its nature. It is Red’s nature, because contrary to the nickname which was only a consequence of fate, this is a consequence of destiny: to be a wave. To grieve like drowning. To wither like salted meat. To beat ceaselessly against an unyielding beachhead.  
  
In the worlds where Liz dies, Red does not so much burn the world as drown it.


	6. echo

In the best of worlds, they raise three orphaned children together, in a large, rambling house-- sometimes on a beach, sometimes deep in the Colorado Rockies-- and Liz wakes up warm next to him and feels loved, and Red wakes up comfortable next to her and feels fulfilled, and their children wake up warm and loved and comfortable and fulfilled and happy.   
  
Reddington makes French toast on the weekends, but only on cloudy weekends-- sunny weekends are special enough already, he claims, and on those mornings he hastily cleans up the childrens’ spilled cereal to spare his very-much-not-a-morning-person wife the sight of it. When she tromps down the stairs he takes her with one hand by the waist and kisses her closest temple, nose in her hair that smells of their sheets, and she mumbles “good morning” and eats her French toast drenched in just as much syrup as the children, and he smiles at them all equally, equally, equally.  
  
This is the rarest world.

\--and this is also one of the best worlds, because it is a world in which he gets to kiss her. A world in which he can take her lips-- even if only for a brutal instant, even if only in agony, even if only for the first and last time-- and memorize them. Tuck them deep within him. Turn the memory to a candle’s flame to light his way: not enough to blind, not enough to brighten or consume, but enough to warm cold fingers over on a winter’s evening; enough to read a book by, enough to eat a meal by. A subsistence disguised as opulence.


	7. alpha, part three

Gravel spills through her earpiece and into her brain.  She physically flinches when it hits her. 

“Agent Keen.”

“ _Reddington_ ,” she spits. “Where’s Ressler.” 

“No need to fear. He’s having a well-deserved nap, and seeing as he’s not currently using his comm,  I thought you and I could take this opportunity to have a nice little chat. Uninterrupted.”

“What do you want?”

“What I’ve always wanted.”

“And that is?”

He chuckles down the line.  It is a falsehood, like most of his outward displays of emotion. Liz once calculated that up to 86% of his facial expressions are mere masks put on by a master actor.  The other 14%--

Well, they’re an anomaly. Truth be told she actually arrived at this statistic by working backward. Sometimes he says something so quietly, or-- no, not quietly, just-- with a _quality_ that Liz can’t put her finger on; can’t find the words to express in a report or a briefing, so she keeps it to herself; but truth be told she can always tell when he’s being sincere (and she knows how crazy this would sound if she ever said it aloud) because she _feels_ it.

Not the way a profiler feels from intuition, but more like the feel of goosebumps on the back of your neck when someone’s watching you, or the sixth sense that tells you when the atmosphere in a room of friends is tense.

And 14% of the time he speaks, he speaks in that voice, and it reasons to logic that the other 86% is lies.

“Well?”

She hears him suck in a breath. “Well, _you_ , Agent Keen.”

“You want-- me? What, want me dead?” She’s ready for him to say yes; her blood speeds up of its own accord; it’s defying gravity and doing cartwheels at her temples, she’s rip-roaring with rage and raring to go, but then he says--

“Of course not. I just want you.”  He pauses. “Just you.”

And her blood hasn’t stopped its mad dance. It’s cadence remains unchanged. She can’t hear anything, and maybe it’s feedback from the sudden resumption of gunshots she hears over the line, and maybe it’s the mad pounding of her own heart faced with 73 hours of no sleep and too much coffee and too much adrenaline, but maybe--

Just maybe--

It’s the thrill of having Raymond Reddington purring _I want you_ through a stolen comm piece.


	8. foxtrot

He proposes to the tune of bullets in the back of an unmarked car with a ring that he has kept on his person at all times for the past three months.

He proposes on his knees at the top of a temple in Myanmar with a ring that he has kept on his person at all times for the past three years.

He proposes sitting by her hospital bed with a ring that he has just then fashioned from the plastic bit left over after opening a water bottle, and he’s apologizing profusely for the makeshift state of it but he isn’t sure if she’ll pull through or not and he _has_ to _ask_ , has to _know_ \--

She says yes.

She says yes.

She says yes.

He shot Tom point-blank in front of her two years ago, and he begs on his knees for her to come away with him.

He gets off a plane with hair to his shoulders and a beard to match, grabs her hand, and tells her he wants to make her his wife, that he never wants to leave her side again.

He stands over a fresh grave and buries a white gold ring in the sod at his feet.

She says no.

She says no.

She says no.


	9. golf

There is a world in which Reddington dies, and Elizabeth Keen is reassigned.  Three months after that, criminals the FBI has never heard of start turning up hogtied at the doorstep of an off-books blacksite, an untraceable sheet of paper pinned to their clothes typed up with a litany of crimes and stamped with a woman’s lipsticked kiss. 

“Red,” Samar observes.

After a moment, Ressler echoes, “…red.”

“Red?” Aram wonders aloud. They turn to look at him, Ressler unpinning the note and holding it up for closer examination.  The penny drops. “Oh,” he says simply.

_Red_.


	10. alpha, part four

She next catches up to him on a subway in New York City, although this is so massively, cosmically unlikely on the relative scale of coincidence that she knows it has to have been _he_ who caught up with _her._ For god’s sake, she isn’t even on duty; and her last lead had placed him in Lisbon.

He’s reading a newspaper across the aisle from her and several seats down.  She’s listening to Beyonce with a pair of earbuds that will only play properly from one side.  The constant roving search of her eyes snags on the fedora, and she double-takes, struggling to control her physical recoil, but it was obviously never any use in the first place. He’s found her. He’s watching her.

She pulls the dead earbud out and holds his stare over the rim of his paper. He folds it; setting it on his lap, lacing his hands over it. He smiles with half his mouth. Liz thumbs the blunt corner of her phone case, frozen in indecision, pinned like some entomological specimen. Should she call her supervisor? Report this?

_Walk over to him, find out what he wants--_

Dial 911? Put in a tip to her own anonymous tip line?

_Pull her gun, set it between his eyes--_

Just walk off at her stop, as if she had never seen him; two boats passing in the night?

She puts the earbud back; glances away. Changes the song to something with a fast tempo that matches the uptick of her heartbeat and flushes out the adrenaline swirling in her system, ready to be tapped. She loses her mind to the song and closes her eyes with her head resting on the back of a dingy plastic seat. When the train next slows, he’s gone.

There’s a dress neatly laid out on her bed in her apartment in the brightest shade of crimson Liz has seen outside of the 1990s and an address with a time next to it on fine hotel stationery.

She goes, of course.  She has an infinity of reasons why she zips up the perfectly-fitting little number and pulls out a matching lipstick she had forgotten she owned, packs a small purse, and puts on a pair of stilettos that haven’t seen use since her engagement party. 

The slow drag of his eyes up and down her form when she meets him is, possibly, at the top of that list.


	11. hotel

Unusually, but occasionally, Raymond Reddington never leaves the Navy.  When he is given leave, he tells his wife a number of days that is one less than he actually has at his disposal, and meets Elizabeth Keen in a bed-and-breakfast in coastal Maine.

_Just a couple days_ , Liz tells Tom, discreetly adding something lacy to her suitcase while her husband’s back is turned, _they’re sending everyone for some kind of educational retreat. It actually sounds kind of nice._

_I’ll miss you,_ he says, stopping her mid-fold of a blouse with the snake of his arms around her waist.

_I'll miss you too,_ she replies, the lie easy on her tongue and face. 

She often misses her husband-- during overtime at the office, on business trips, even half-hour grocery runs--

but never while in Maine. 


	12. india

There is a breathing, living, solid, warm body to her left. Everywhere else is empty space. Emptiness, being the lack of things, is potentially open to all things, all threats; dangers--

But to her left, there is Raymond Reddington, and if she leans towards him just this next fraction, he can become everything. His arms will block out the emptiness. It won’t be able to touch her. There will only be his safety. She tilts her nose to her shoulder and conveniently catches a whiff of him, and the part of her that is trying with both hands to push her tumbling brick walls of strength back upright trips over fallen masonry and nearly gives in completely. But not yet. 

Not until he does the same thing (looking down and to his right, bringing their faces into alignment on the same plane of sight) does she let someone else handle shoring up her walls for a change. She folds into him and he shifts his whole body immediately toward her, hands splaying wide over her shoulder blade and half-over, half-below the waistline of her pants. She shoves her arms inelegantly under his jacket, damns the presence of the waistcoat blocking his body heat from her greedy fingertips, buries her cheek against his chest and breathes great, shuddering breaths that could nearly be called sobs.

His fingers comb through her hair. Many people have performed this caress on her before, but nothing compares to the way this makes her feel; unmoored and shaky yet inviolable. She rises and falls with the cadence of his breathing. She wants to melt into him; she wants to be so close, she wants to know only Reddington, feel only Reddington, be only with Reddington--

Her fists clench and unclench at his sides--

He separates his legs so that her thighs can fall between them, slotting their bodies together like puzzle pieces--

“Everything,” his breath whispers to the shell of her ear, “is going to be alright.” His lips follow closely after the words. Lizzie’s reply is swallowed by his clothes, but reverberates in his chest.

She feels as though she is his entire world, in this moment; and she later feels selfish for demanding his comfort so greedily.

He feels as though she is his entire world, and in that moment he feels selfish for drinking his fill of her addictive attention so readily. 

This is the only thing that unites all realities. In every possible world, this is how Liz feels when Red holds her in his arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear lord, this one's sappy. I could hardly bring myself to post it. But then again, it is an epilogue of sorts. I think a modicum of "sappy" is allowed in an epilogue, don't you? 
> 
> I'd like to say thank you to everyone who's left comments on this fic. As a whole, it's probably the nicest round of feedback I've ever gotten on a fic, and I appreciate them all immensely :)


End file.
